How Pickleball Kingdom Doubled Tournament Registrations through Personalization at Scale Using ACHQ

When Mitch Kistner joined Pickleball Kingdom as VP of Marketing in 2024, the company had four open locations and was sharing assets with franchisees through Dropbox. By early 2026, Pickleball Kingdom had 33 locations open across the United States, nearly 400 franchise territories sold, and its first international club opening on June 28th, 2026 in India. A lot of that growth came down to building the right systems fast, and ActiveCampaign was a key pillar of the tech stack the company needed to achieve that growth.

Pickleball Kingdom was founded by Ace Rodrigues, a former Division I quarterback at the University of Hawaii who discovered pickleball through his church community in Arizona in 2021. What hooked him wasn't just the sport. It was watching people with no athletic background pick up a paddle and have a good time within an hour. What bothered him was the outdoor experience: heat, dirty courts, Arizona wind. His fix was to take the whole thing indoors.

The first location opened in Chandler, Arizona in 2022. By 2023, Rodrigues had started selling franchises. The company is now on track to hit 100 open locations by the end of 2027, with active expansion into India, Europe, and other international markets soon to be announced

Kistner joined at a pivotal moment in Pickleball Kingdom’s growth. "I got brought on to build the resources, platforms, and scale the system from what it was at the time," he says.

Before Kistner joined, Pickleball Kingdom was using Mailchimp for email. Everything else, assets, templates, brand materials, got shared through Dropbox. There was no CRM, no learning management system, and no formal process for getting marketing materials to individual club operators consistently.

The tooling gap was fixable. The harder problem was structural. Pickleball Kingdom's franchisees are business owners from all kinds of professional backgrounds, and most of them have no marketing experience. "We're often training people that are very successful in their own right, whatever industry they might have come from, but they aren't marketers," Kistner says. Email adoption across franchisees was low and there was no system for pushing brand assets or campaigns to individual clubs without doing it manually.

Kistner knew he needed an enterprise platform, not another point solution. His evaluation came down to three things: whether the platform could scale across a franchise system, whether non-marketer franchisees could use the system intuitively, and whether it could integrate with PodPlay, the reservation system Pickleball Kingdom uses for court bookings and membership management.

ActiveCampaign's ACHQ checked all three boxes. The ability to push templates and automations from a corporate parent account down to individual franchise accounts was non-negotiable for a system that needed brand consistency across dozens of independent operators. Kistner also discovered that "ActiveCampaign had previously worked with PodPlay, so there was already an established relationship in place, which helped streamline the implementation process."

He was also adamant about building a well-connected ecosystem of tools. "My goal is to always consolidate as many platforms as we can," he says. ActiveCampaign was the platform the company could grow into rather than grow out of.

Every Pickleball Kingdom location offers a free introductory class called “Pickleball 101” twice daily. It exists to lower the barrier for new players, but from a marketing standpoint, it's also the top of the membership funnel. The automation built around it is the most important one Pickleball Kingdom runs.

Every visitor, regardless of why they came in, signs a digital waiver at the front desk before they can access the courts. That's a legal requirement tied to liability, but it doubles as universal contact capture. The waiver data flows into ActiveCampaign via a custom API connection between PodPlay and ActiveCampaign.

Once a contact is in the system, the enrollment trigger for the Pickleball 101 automation is conditional. The contact must have checked in for the class but not yet converted to a paid membership. Anyone who buys a membership at the door skips the sequence entirely. "Our automation is driven by customer behavior. After someone attends Pickleball 101, the system checks whether they've converted to a membership. If not, they're entered into a personalized nurture sequence. If they convert at any point, they're automatically removed and transitioned into our Welcome Series, ensuring every communication stays timely and relevant," Kistner explains.

The automation runs for up to 45 days, with the bulk of the sequence concentrated in the first two weeks while the new visitor's experience is still fresh. Early messages focus on education and community, introducing the sport's benefits and what the club has to offer, before gradually introducing membership offers and other ways to stay involved.

The membership pitch intentionally doesn't appear until email later in the series. Kistner explains, "We intentionally wait until about the fifth email because we want to capitalize on those first couple of weeks while the experience is still fresh. They've been in the club, had a great experience, and that's when we start introducing the membership opportunity in a more natural way." The goal is to give someone a reason to come back before presenting them with the larger commitment of membership.

When a new Pickleball Kingdom location comes online, the GM doesn't start from a blank slate. Kistner's team has built a standard automation package that gets deployed into every new franchisee's ActiveCampaign account during onboarding. From day one, every club has the following live:

• Welcome Series (Non-Member)
• Welcome Series (Member)
• Win-Back Campaign
• Birthday Automation
• Membership Anniversary Automation
• Pickleball 101 sequence (above)

Franchisees review the automations with Kistner's team, then connect with ActiveCampaign directly for additional training on the platform. After that, they turn the automations on.

What makes this practical for operators who aren't marketers is the variable data functionality built into every template and automation. Club-specific details, location name, local contact information, event specifics, auto-populate when a GM opens a template. They're not editing from scratch. They're reviewing and sending.

Kistner called this out as his favorite feature in the platform. "If we bring on a new franchisee or GM who has little to no marketing experience, they're able to log in, review the automations, and turn them on with confidence. Everything is already populated with their club-specific data, so when we push out a tournament or promotional campaign, they can review it, click send in a matter of minutes, and get back to focusing on their business."

ACHQ’s model gives Pickleball Kingdom a parent account at the corporate level, with individual child accounts for each franchise location. From the parent account, Kistner's team can push email templates, automations, and full campaigns to every child account simultaneously, without logging into each one individually.

When the Clubhouse team builds a campaign for a national promotion or event, it goes to all locations at once. Templates are built so franchisees can make local edits, adjusting dates or market-specific details, while staying within brand guidelines. For operators who aren't thinking about content calendars, having a ready-to-send template appear in their account removes most of the friction. "Being able to build out the templates, automations and resources and push those across the entire system, as well as push national campaigns across the entire system, is very easy for us to do from our corporate office," Kistner says.

To share a recent example, Pickleball Kingdom hosted an optional system-wide tournament called Kingdom Clash. Our corporate marketing team developed the complete campaign, including email templates, creative assets, and supporting marketing materials, then distributed everything to participating clubs from a single corporate account. Within minutes, each club had a fully branded, club-specific campaign ready to review and send to its members.

When Kistner arrived, franchisees felt disconnected from The Clubhouse (Corporate). There wasn't a consistent channel for updates, and clubs would sometimes go stretches without knowing what was happening across the system.

His fix was a recurring email called Clubhouse Connect, sent at least twice a month to all franchisees and GMs through ActiveCampaign. It covers marketing updates, operations news, franchise-wide announcements, membership records broken across the system, and links back to the Royal Vault, which is what Pickleball Kingdom calls their digital asset library.

"It's become a great complement to our overall franchise communication strategy. It gives us another consistent touchpoint to share updates, new assets, and best practices while keeping franchisees informed and engaged," Kistner says. The newsletter has become the primary channel for distributing new assets and communicating what's changing system-wide.

Pickleball Kingdom recently started rolling out SMS communication through ActiveCampaign. Thirteen clubs are currently active on it, using it primarily for flash sales, event promotions, and membership offers.

Without any top-down mandate, clubs are organically scaling their own SMS usage (Kistner commenting that signals indicate usage has doubled this year, and they project it will double again by the end of 2026). At one Pickleball Kingdom location, the GM described SMS as their most critical channel for driving conversions, filling court vacancies, and boosting event attendance.

The next step is layering SMS into the automations that are already running. The Pickleball 101 sequence, for example, currently runs entirely on email. The plan is to add SMS touchpoints for clubs that have it turned on, so the same automation delivers across both channels depending on what each club has set up. "If a club comes on board or they turn on SMS and they're already established, they're able to use the Pickleball 101 with SMS or visitor follow-up with SMS," Kistner explains.

Every Pickleball Kingdom location is now on ActiveCampaign and actively using it. That's a full 100% franchisee adoption rate across a network that had low, inconsistent email usage just two years ago.

The results speak for themselves:

• 200% increase in tournament registrations at one location after two targeted email campaigns segmented by past event participants and email openers
• 40.6% average email open rate across all system-wide communications year-to-date
• 100% franchisee adoption of ActiveCampaign across all open locations, including clubs that initially resisted the transition
• 2x increase in SMS usage expected by end of year

"Franchisees feel comfortable and confident using the platform, and that ultimately drives results," Kistner says. "We've definitely seen an uptick in adoption and then usage as well, which ultimately converts to dollars, whether it's through league signups, memberships, tournament registrations."

The near-term roadmap has a few distinct threads. SMS gets layered into existing automations first. The Pickleball 101 sequence and visitor follow-up workflows are the obvious starting points. Clubs that have SMS turned on will get multi-channel versions of automations that currently run on email only.

On segmentation, the Royal Family Membership opens up a specific opportunity. That tier covers parents and up to two children under one account, and it includes birth date data. This gives Pickleball Kingdom the ability to trigger private events promotions three months before each child's birthday, targeting parents who are already members and already have the habit of coming to the club.

Internationally, WhatsApp is on the roadmap for good reason. In India, where Pickleball Kingdom's first international location opened June 28th, 2026, email addresses aren't routinely collected during booking or registration the way they are in the United States. WhatsApp is the default communication channel, and that's true across many of the international markets Pickleball Kingdom is targeting. ActiveCampaign gives Kistner the ability to build around that reality from the start.

With 100 locations on the horizon and a first international market just getting started, the infrastructure Kistner built in his first year is going to carry a lot more weight. The foundation, at least, is solid. If you’d like to see how ACHQ can help level up your franchise business, request a demo today!